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Information Theoretic Philosophy of Mind To appear in In L. Floridi (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information. London: Routledge. Chapter 29: Information-Theoretic Philosophy of Mind Jason Winning and William Bechtel 1. Introduction The branch of philosophy known as “philosophy of mind,” at its core, is concerned with two closely related questions: What sort of thing is a mind or mental state? And how are these related to the non-mental? We know some of the characteristic activities of minds: thinking, remembering, dreaming, imagining, etc. We consider certain types of things to be mental, i.e., to exist only in minds, as mental “states” or properties, or “mental contents”: thoughts, memories, desires, emotions, and what philosophers refer to as “qualia” (that aspect of an experience that one refers to by the phrase “what it is like to undergo it”; see chapter 30). We also consider certain kinds of things to be non-mental, such as rocks, tables, and rain drops. These do not have minds, do not constitute minds, and cannot exist in minds as mental states or properties. Minds, and the states they can undergo, are mental; things that cannot be minds and cannot be undergone by minds are non-mental. But is there a third category of thing, that can exist either inside or outside of minds? Consider the question of how communication is possible between minds. Warren Weaver, one of the pioneers of mathematical communication theory, defined communication in mental terms as “all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another” (1949: 2). At least in some instances, communication might be described as a process whereby the contents of mental states (such as thoughts or hopes) can be sent from one mind to another. In order for this to occur, there must be some medium by which the contents are conveyed—by which the mental contents are able to be sent between minds; naturalistic philosophers do not believe that a semantic content can merely float in space-time by itself, or that the contents of mental states can jump immediately from one mind to another without crossing some type of non-mental medium. These “contents,” of course, are not strictly speaking mental contents when they are being conveyed outside of a mind; instead of residing in a mind, they reside within (or as it is usually put, are “carried by” or “tokened by”) non-mental vehicles. ‘Vehicle’ is a term introduced by Dennett (1969) to refer to any given manifestation of a content; the vehicle makes it possible for the content to be tokened (instantiated) at a given place and time. Such vehicles might include black ink on a page, or patterns of electricity running along a wire. We also have a word to refer to such tokenized contents while they are being conveyed from place to place, or even when they are being stored or processed outside of minds: information. Information is here being understood broadly, as that which has a vehicle and a content. A further prefatory terminological clarification is in order. The concepts of informational content and vehicle are also closely related to the concept of representation. Sometimes authors use the term ‘representation’ to refer to the relation that holds between any vehicle and its content, some restrict its use to the relation holding for a particular category of these, and some use it to refer to either the content or the vehicle standing in such a relationship. The following remarks by Dretske are pertinent here: There are representational vehicles—the objects, events, or conditions that represent—and representational contents—the conditions or situations the vehicle represents as being so. In speaking about representations, then, we must be clear whether we are talking about content or vehicle, about what is represented or the representation itself. It makes a big difference. In the case of mental representations, the vehicle (a belief or an experience) is in the head. Content—what is believed and experienced—is (typically) not. … When I speak of representations I shall always mean representational vehicle. (2003: 68) There is a large debate about the nature of the representation relation and how it is (conceptually or otherwise) related to content. Here, we wish to largely sidestep this debate; we will simply follow Dretske in using ‘representation’ as synonymous with ‘representational vehicle’ and we will consider representations to be one species of vehicle, possibly among others. We also wish to sidestep the internalism/externalism debate about mental content. The issue of whether some mental content is “outside the head” is independent of the vehicle/content distinction. Even if mental contents are themselves mind-external, or if they are fixed by mind- external facts, we can still make sense of those contents being communicated to another mind, or of the mental vehicles in another mind taking up that same content. Either way, such a process may involve this content being encoded and transmitted by means of mind-external informational vehicles. 2. Communication, Control, and Computation Karl Pribram has claimed that information is a notion that is “neutral to the mind/brain dichotomy” (1986: 507). As such, it can be a powerful bridge principle in philosophy of mind’s quest to answer the questions about the identity of the mental and the relation between the mental and the non-mental. But it is a bridge that has only become available in the last century or so as a result of the development of technologies for sending, generating, processing, storing, and consuming information. These advancements created the practical need, in the mid-20th century, for scientific theories of communication (e.g., Shannon 1948), control (e.g., Wiener 1948), and computation (e.g., Turing 1936). 2.1. Communication With the advent of the telegraph and telephone as technologies for transmitting messages, questions arose as to the requirements for reliable transmission. Pioneers in the field of mathematical communication theory such as Harry Nyquist, R. V. Hartley, and Claude Shannon realized the need for exact measurement of information transmission capacity, regardless of the specific technology involved. In doing so they abstracted away from the semantic interpretation of the messages themselves and introduced the crucial conceptual distinction between semantic meaning (sometimes referred to as “semantic information”; see chapter 6) and the statistically quantifiable reduction of uncertainty that is achieved in a given communication process. By isolating the latter, important mathematical results from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics could be applied directly to problems faced by communications engineers.1 Shannon’s (1948) mathematical communication theory (which many authors simply refer to as information theory, see chapter 4) was very influential on scientists and philosophers, including those mentioned in the following sections. In particular, it helped convince them that informational processes are as much at home in a purely naturalistic theory as any physical phenomena. It is no surprise that the most influential philosophical treatment of information, Dretske’s 1981, discussed in a later section, draws heavily from Shannon’s work. 2.2. Control An important use of information is to enable one system to control another system. A basic but highly potent form of control is negative feedback, whereby the activity of a system is corrected in light of information received back by the system about the results of the activity. For example, as you move towards a target you acquire information about the discrepancy between your current location and the target and use that to correct your motion. The potency of negative feedback was independently recognized in engineering and in biology. A particularly prominent mechanical engineering example was James Watt’s invention in the 1780s of the centrifugal governor (Figure 29.1) to control the speed of a steam engine. When the flywheel turned too fast, centrifugal force would cause the angle arms attached to a spindle to extend up and out and, via a linkage mechanism, close the valve. When it moved too slowly, the arms would drop and cause the valve to open.<FIGURE 29.1 HERE> In biology, Claude Bernard, in attempting to answer the challenge of vitalists who thought that only a non-physical force could explain the ability of organisms to resist destruction by physical processes, introduced the idea that organisms maintain the constancy of their internal environment by responding to conditions that disrupt them, a process Walter Cannon termed homeostasis. Drawing upon his own use of negative feedback in designing targeting systems for weapons, as well as Cannon’s application of negative feedback in explaining how animals maintain homeostasis, Norbert Wiener (1948) elevated the principle of negative feedback to a general design principle for achieving control in both biology and engineering. He coined the term cybernetics to describe this framework and inspired an interdisciplinary movement involving mathematicians, engineers, neurophysiologists, and psychologists, amongst others, devoted to understanding the control of activities through negative feedback. 2.3. Computation The term computation originally applied to the activity of humans in computing sums by applying rules to symbols written on a page. Given the tediousness of the activity, there has been a long history of humans attempting to automate the process. An important milestone was Charles Babbage’s design of the difference engine to compute polynomial functions, and the analytical engine, which could be programmed by punch cards to execute any computation. Babbage did not succeed in building either of these devices. Alan Turing (1936) proposed an extremely simple machine that could be configured to compute any function. It consists of an indefinitely long tape on which a string of symbols (e.g., 0s and 1s) are written and a read/write device that can move along the tape while reading from it or writing to it.
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